Historian David Olusoga on questioning stories and rejecting ‘culture wars’

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When historian, broadcaster and writer David Olusoga gave his inaugural lecture as professor of public history at the University of Manchester in 2019, he described himself as a ‘connective circuit’ between the worlds of academia and public history.

It seems a fitting term for someone who has dedicated his career to bringing the stories of history to a wide audience, through television programmes including Civilisations; Black and British: A Forgotten History; A House Through Time; and the BAFTA-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners.

As we meet in a central London conference room, just before he takes to the stage for the closing keynote interview at the recent MRS annual conference, Insight Alchemy, Olusoga talks about how researchers can draw on emotive narratives effectively.

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools hitting the headlines, he thinks we would be ‘naïve’ not to look at the evolution of AI and algorithms and ‘not be nervous’, and points to the very human pursuit of storytelling.

“There’s something very deep within human psychology, which is the ability to tell stories. My job and my role very much is as a translator of information into story,” he says. “Connected circuitry translates information and data into story, and I’m constantly appealing to people who research areas I’m interested in to become better storytellers.”

Olusoga began his work in television – initially in research and later presenting – after studying the history of slavery at the University of Liverpool. He is also the author of five books, including Black and British: A Forgotten History, published in 2016.

“My career has fundamentally been about one thing: story,” he says. “If I were to define, in very basic terms, what I do, I’m a storyteller. I’ve spent my entire career working in radio, television, newspapers, publishing, and I think the thing that characterises most of the work I’ve done is an attempt to use story and the fact that we are naturally storytelling and story-receiving creatures to explore, and publicise, the issues and events I’m interested in.”

Storytelling is perhaps more challenging at a time of information overload. The rise of media fragmentation and social media platforms, coupled with smartphones, means that, by virtue of living in the modern world, we are bombarded with ‘content’ on a daily basis.

When I ask Olusoga what skills we need to better understand and navigate an uncertain world – one that many agree is experiencing a state of ‘permacrisis’ – he points first to understanding what is factual.

“Ten years ago, people would have said that the key skill was analysing information, and now I think the key skill is recognising what’s information and what’s opinion,” he says.

“We’re currently in an information climate unlike anything that’s existed before and it’s been really rapid, and it’s crept up on us in a way that nobody predicted.” Casting our minds back a decade or so, Olusoga points to the ‘somewhat utopian belief’ during the Arab Spring of 2011 that new technologies would allow groups of citizens to overthrow dictators and threaten authoritarian forms of government.

“We ended that decade with a very strong belief by many analysts that those technologies of social media were not the great threat to forms of totalitarian and authoritarian rule, but they were the greatest asset that those forms of government had ever received, and that they were perhaps even incompatible with democracy.”

Olusoga believes we are living in a world in which we are ‘drowning in opinion’. In this context, the ability to recognise opinion, distinguishing it from fact, creates a new challenge, in addition to the need for analysis of data.

“It’s [about] actually accessing data, recognising what is data and what is opinion,” he says.

Distinguishing between the two is ‘simply a struggle’, he acknowledges, adding that much of what we’re talking about when we discuss media overload is opinion-based content, rather than factual information.

“Many of these channels, websites and publications predominantly publish opinion. It’s not that we aren’t drowning in information, it’s that the surfeit of information is a very small amount of the overload of stimulus that we’re being fed, but the key task is going to be determining what is information and what is opinion.”

While that doesn’t remove the problem of vast amounts of information that is easier than ever to access, Olusoga says: “Our fundamental crisis is that we have a social media and media ecosystem that has monetised opinion far more than it has monetised information and the distribution of information.

“Opinion is cheap; information gathering and knowledge production is expensive. That mismatch in the market is at the very root cause of what I think is a crisis.”

False debates

Today, producers of any information – or, indeed, anyone with any kind of public profile – can potentially find themselves attacked over cultural issues, whether they have entered the discussion willingly or otherwise. Outrage, whether genuine or manufactured, generates ‘eyeballs’ in a time of media fragmentation and publishers vying for attention.

Puffin, for example, was on the receiving end of ‘woke’ accusations after media reports on the book publisher’s plans to tweak Roald Dahl’s work for new editions, to remove terms deemed offensive. Even the National Trust was attacked by Conservative MPs and peers, and then right-wing commentators, when it published research examining its properties’ links with the slave trade and colonialism.

So, how can facts and accurate information win out in such an incendiary context? When there is such a prevalence of opinion, and when opinion is what brings home the bacon in a splintered media ecosystem that relies on attention and outrage, how can information cut through?

Olusoga is of the view that the first step we need to take is realising that ‘culture wars’ are not, in fact, real. “One of the challenges is not to play to the culture wars – to recognise that they are confected; that they are unreal and that they are designed to create electoral coalitions or climates of fear in which electoral outcomes are more likely,” he says.

“To enter into the culture wars is to accept the binary debate, to accept the terms on which those debates are drawn, and I don’t think we should.

“I think anybody who’s interested in verifiable fact and in generating metrics by which we might improve our societies needs to always, in those debates, repeatedly and constantly point out that the terms of these debates are false and invalid.”

As someone who writes and speaks prevalently about race, Olusoga has been on the receiving end of accusations that he himself is involved in ‘culture war’ issues. But, he says: “I’ve never engaged in those issues without making the point that these debates are false, fake, illegitimate debates, almost always with a strategic electoral purpose behind them.”

What has been his personal experience of speaking out and writing about issues such as race and addressing our colonial history in quite a febrile time? “One of aggression, abuse, threats of violence – I’ve had to have bodyguards and I’ve discussed this with the police.”

He asserts, however, that this is “not a very unusual or interesting experience”. Instead, what he finds “really alarming” is not what people say, but “the confidence with which people have convinced themselves not just that they know what your views are, but that they understand the motivations that have led you to reach those views”.

That confidence is so watertight and extreme, says Olusoga, that it leads people to “demonstrably preposterous positions”.

He shares an example of a regular occurrence he experiences on social media – the suggestion that he wants to create racial tension.

“Every week, virtually every day, someone on social media or some other form of media will tell me that I hate white people, when I’m demonstrably and openly mixed race [Olusoga was born to a Nigerian father and white British mother, and grew up in Gateshead]. They will suggest that I want to create tension between white people and black people, when my home is a mixture of white people and black people.”

The fact that such comments can be made – online and often anonymously – without consideration shows “a charge of false consciousness that is created by that environment and people that become trapped in it”, says Olusoga.

Despite experiencing online abuse, Olusoga doesn’t blame the individuals themselves, but rather the system of misinformation and algorithms – one that inflates popular content with scant regard for accuracy and facilitates an environment for online trolling. He believes that those stuck in this ecosystem should be treated with the same sympathy and empathy as those addicted to substances or gambling.

“These are people who have lost rational cognition on certain issues, not because they’re terrible people, but because they’ve been trapped in a system that is very sophisticatedly designed to work to the worst attributes of human nature,” he says.

“The algorithms and the social media platforms have computing power that just 10 years ago was almost beyond comprehension. They are exploiting and developing understandings of human psychology and human behaviour that are beyond anything [George] Orwell could have imagined, and we have our simple organic brains up against computing power far beyond our imagining.

“We need to recognise that the people who are trapped in this are up against a system of astonishing sophistication that has weaponised the worst features of our nature and the way our minds and our cognition works.”

Olusoga wrote his first book – The Kaiser’s Holocaust, about a German genocide in Namibia – with Casper Erichsen, after the two saw mass graves where bodies had risen to the surface and made a pact to tell the stories of the victims. But painful stories are not consigned to the past, and to understand attitudes and issues such as racism one must look into the history of how ideas are constructed, Olusoga believes.

During his keynote interview with Sinead Jefferies at the MRS conference, Olusoga discussed how ideas from the past continue to affect society today, pointing out that attitudes can’t be fully understood without understanding their roots.

Referencing the European Social Survey, which, in 2019, found that 18% of British respondents agreed with the statement ‘some races or ethnic groups are born less intelligent than others’, he said: “It’s equally important not just to worry about [the figure of] 18%, but also that these ideas are 300 years old and have had to transmit themselves like a virus – things you read in documents are not trapped in the 18th century.”

Olusoga argued that it is important to understand that attitudes, such as racist beliefs, have roots, because “we can’t understand these things properly until we understand how old they are”.

Ideas were built and constructed, he continued during the conference session. “These ideas exist in the 21st century because of the fact they were put there. This was a system of belief that was invented and propagated by popular culture, not just ingrained beliefs.

“If we are going to fight these ideas, we need to understand how they were built. If you wanted to destroy a building, you would look at the blueprints to understand how it was built. The blueprints of these ideas lie in the historical documents.”

That black women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white women – most recently confirmed in the MBRRACE report in November 2022 – is “one of the few facts that has cut through”, said Olusoga. He added: “Historians can never fully understand these ideas if we only understand how they operate now.”

During his session, Olusoga said he felt Roots had been the most important book in the history of slavery. While the novel is not a history book, but a “factually flawed” narrative of an individual and a family, Olusoga said: “It worked in the way that history books tend not to work. It worked through the personal, the individual, and through the comfort we feel with narrative.

“One of the great problems that many academics in many fields face is that we’ve turned our back on story. We think that analysis, debate and the application of theory to information is what is regarded as scholarship. That is quite a modern idea and I think it’s quite a damaging one.”

Retreating to theory and analysis alone happened at “the worst possible time for academics to make themselves hard to understand”, said Olusoga, adding: “We need data and analysis, we need depth of thinking more than ever – this retreat from story has been deeply damaging.”

This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of Impact.

Original photography by Will Amlot